Part 2
The anxious teachers wrote to Balzac's parents to come for him as soon as possible. His mother hurried to him and picked him up to take him back to Tours. The astonishment of the family was great when they saw the thin and sickly child that the school had returned to them in place of the cherub it had received, and it was distressing for Honoré's grandmother. Not only had he lost his beautiful colors and his youthful sturdiness, but, struck by a congestion of ideas, he appeared to be an imbecile. His manner was that of an ecstatic, of a somnambulist who sleeps with his eyes open: lost in a profound reverie, he did not hear that which was said to him, or his mind, returning from afar, arrived too late to respond. But the open air, rest, the nurturing environment of the family, the recreations they forced him to take and the vigorous juices of adolescence soon triumphed over this sickly state. The tumult caused in that young brain by the whirring of ideas diminished. Little by little, the muddled readings became organized; abstractions came to be blended into real images, observations made silently on life; while walking and playing, he studied the pretty landscapes of the Loire, the provincial types, the cathedral of Saint-Gatien and the characteristic physiognomies of the priests and canons; many of the images which later served in the grand fresco of the Comédie were sketched during this period of fruitful inaction. However, the intelligence of Balzac was not perceived or understood any more in his family than at school. Even if something clever escaped his lips, his mother, despite being a superior woman, would say to him: "Without a doubt, Honoré, you don't understand what you are saying." And Balzac would laugh, without further explanation, that wonderful laugh that he had. Balzac's father, who shared qualities at that time with Montaigne, Rabelais, and Uncle Toby, by his philosophy, his originality, and his goodness (it's Madame de Surville who is speaking), had a little better opinion of his son, believing due to certain genetic theories that he held that a child created by himself could not be stupid: nevertheless, he had no suspicion of the great man that he would become in the future.
Balzac's family having returned to Paris, he was entered into the boarding school of Monsieur Lepitre, Rue Saint-Louis, and Messieurs Sganzer and Beuzelin, Rue Thoringy in the Marais. There as at the school in Vendôme, his genius did not reveal itself, and he remained in the midst of the troop of ordinary students. No prefect exclaimed to him: "You will be Marcellus!" or "Thus you shall go to the stars!"
His classes finished, Balzac gave himself that second education which is the true one; he studied, perfected himself, attended the courses of the Sorbonne, and studied law while working with an attorney and a notary. This time, apparently lost, since Balzac became neither an attorney, nor a notary, nor a lawyer, nor a judge, gave him a personal acquaintance with the personnel of the Bazoche and led him to later write what I might call the litigations of La Comédie Humaine in the style of a man marvelously versed in that profession.
The examinations passed, the great question of which career to select presented itself. His family wanted to make a notary of Balzac; but the future great writer, who, even though no one believed in his genius, had a consciousness of it himself, refused in a most respectful manner, although they had organized a position on the most favorable terms. His father gave him two years to prove himself, and as the family had returned to the provinces, Madame Balzac installed Honoré in a garret, allowing him a stipend sufficient for only his most pressing needs, hoping that a little hardship would make him wiser.
This garret was perched on the Rue de Lesdiguières, number nine, near the Arsenal, whose library offered its resources to the young laborer. Without a doubt, to pass from an abundant and luxurious house to a miserable hovel would be difficult at any age other than 21, which was the age of Balzac; but if the dream of every child is to have boots, that of every young man is to have a room, a room all to himself, whose key he carries in his pocket, although he can stand upright only at its center: a room, it's the trappings of virility, it's independence, personality, love!
Behold then master Honoré perched near the sky, seated before his table, and trying to create a work that would justify the indulgence of his father and disprove the unfavorable predictions of his friends. It is a remarkable thing that Balzac debuted with a tragedy, with a Cromwell! Around that same time, Victor Hugo also put the last touches on his Cromwell, whose preface became the manifesto of all young dramatists.
II
In attentively rereading La Comédie Humaine when one has known Balzac personally, one finds there scattered curious details with regard to his character and his life, particularly in his first works, where he has not yet separated out his own personality, and, due to a lack of subjects, observes and dissects himself. I have said that he began his rude apprenticeship for the literary life in a garret on the Rue Lesdiguières, near the Arsenal. The novel Facino Cane, published in Paris in March, 1836, and dedicated to Louise, contains some precious information regarding the life that this young aspirant for glory led in his aerial nest.
"I lived then in a street which without doubt you do not know, the Rue Lesdiguières: it begins at the Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite a fountain, near the Place de la Bastille, and leads into the Rue de la Cerisaie. The love of science had thrown me into an attic where I wrote all night, and I passed the day in a neighboring library, that of Monsieur; I lived frugally, I had accepted all of the conditions of the monastic life, so necessary for laborers. When the weather was fine, I allowed myself a walk on the Boulevard Bourbon. One sole passion enticed me from my studious habits; but wasn't this also studying? I went to observe the manners of the neighborhood, its inhabitants and their characters. As ill clad as the workers, indifferent to decorum, I did not put them on their guard against me: I could mingle in their groups, see them conclude their deals, and hear them argue about the time that they would stop working. For me, observation had already become intuitive, it penetrated the soul without neglecting the body; in other words it so thoroughly grasped exterior that it transcended it immediately; it gave me the ability to live the life of the individual on which I was focused and permitted me to substitute myself for him, like the dervish of the Thousand and One Nights seized the body and the soul of persons over whom he pronounced certain words.
"When, between eleven o'clock and midnight, I met a workman and his wife returning from the Ambigu-Comique, I amused myself by following them from the Boulevard Pont-aux-Choux to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. These good people would at first speak of the play that they had just seen; next they would address their personal affairs; the mother would pull the child by the hand without listening to either his complaints or his questions. The married couple would count up the money that would be paid to them the next day. They would spend it in twenty different ways. They would then move on to household matters, complaints over the excessive price of potatoes or the length of the winter and the rise in the cost of butter, energetic discussions on how much was owed to the baker, and finally onto discussions where each of them became irritated and demonstrated his character with picturesque words. In listening to these people, I could connect with their life, I felt their rags upon my back, I walked with my feet in their tattered shoes; their desires, their needs, all passed into my soul, and my soul passed into theirs; it was the dream of an awakened man. I became exasperated with them against the workshop foremen who tyrannized them or against the unfair practice that made them return many times without providing them with their pay. To abandon habits, to become another through this intoxication of the moral faculties and to play this game at will, such was my entertainment. To what do I owe this gift? Is it an extrasensory perception? Is it one of those qualities whose abuse would lead to madness? I have never sought the sources of this power; I possess it and I use it, that is all."
I have transcribed these lines, which are doubly interesting because they illuminate a little-known side of Balzac's life, and because they show that he was conscious of this powerful faculty of intuition that he already possessed at such a high level and without which the realization of his work would have been impossible. Balzac, like Vishnu, the Indian god, possessed the gift of metamorphosis, that is to say the ability to incarnate himself into different bodies and live in them as long as he wished; however, the number of the metamorphoses of Vishnu is fixed at ten: those of Balzac are countless, and furthermore he could produce them at will. Although it may seem extravagant to say this in the heart of the nineteenth century, Balzac was a seer. His merits as an observer, his acuteness as a physiologist, his genius as a writer, do not suffice to explain the infinite variety of the two or three thousand types which play a more or less important role in La Comédie Humaine. He did not copy them, he lived them in an ideal manner, he wore their clothes, he took on their habits, he immersed himself in their surroundings, he was them for as long as necessary. From there come these authentic, logical characters, never contradicting themselves and never forgetting themselves, endowed with an intimate and profound existence, who, to use one of his expressions, took on the challenge of life in civil society. Truly red blood circulated in their veins in place of the ink that infused the creations of ordinary writers.
Balzac did not possess this ability for any time except the present. He could transport his thought into a marquis, into a financier, into a middle-class person, into a man of the people, into a woman of the world, into a courtesan, but the shadows of the past did not obey his call: he never knew, like Goethe, how to evoke from the depths of antiquity the beautiful Hélène and make her dwell in the Gothic manor of Faust. With two or three exceptions, all of his work is modern; he has assimilated the living, he has not resurrected the dead. Even history seduced him little, as one can see from the preface to La Comédie Humaine: "In reading the dry and off-putting catalogues of facts called histories, who has not recognized that the writers have forgotten in every era, in Egypt, in Persia, in Greece, in Rome, to give us the history of manners? The piece by Petronius on the private life of the Romans irritates rather than satisfies our curiosity."
This void left by the historians of vanished societies, Balzac proposed to fill for our own, and God knows that he carefully followed the program that he had planned.
"Society was going to be the historian, I should not be but the secretary; in constructing the inventory of vices and of virtues, in assembling the principal features of the passions, in depicting the characters, in choosing the principal events of the society, in composing types by the blending of traits of several homogeneous characters, perhaps I could succeed in writing the history forgotten by so many historians, that of manners. With a great deal of patience and courage, I might be able to complete, on nineteenth century France, the book that we all regret that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, India, have unfortunately not left us on their civilization, and that like the abbot Bartholomew, the courageous and patient Monteil had attempted regarding the Middle Ages, although in a form that was not appealing."
But let us return to the garret on the Rue Lesdiguières. Balzac had not conceived the plan of the work that would immortalize him; he was still seeking it with anxiety, bated breath, and hard labor, trying everything and succeeding in nothing; however he already possessed that obstinacy in his work to which Minerva, as surly as she might be, must one day or another yield; he outlined comic operas, made plans for comedies, dramas and romances whose titles Madame de Surville has preserved: Stella, Coqsigrue, Les Deux Philosophes, without counting the terrible Cromwell, whose verses had caused him so much pain and yet were not worth much more than that which began his epic poem, Incas.
Imagine to yourself young Honoré, his legs wrapped in a patched coat, his upper body protected by an old shawl of his mother, his headdress a sort of Dantesque cap and his hair of a cut that only Madame de Balzac knew, his coffee pot to his left, his inkwell to his right, working with a heaving chest and bowed forehead, like an ox at the plow, the field still stony and not cleared by those thoughts which would later trace for him such productive furrows. The lamp shines like a star in the front of the dark house, the snow falls in silence on the loosened tiles, the wind blows through the door and window "like Tulou on his Flute, but less agreeably."
If some dawdling passerby had raised his eyes toward that little, obstinately flickering glow, he certainly would not have suspected that it was the dawning of one of the greatest glories of our age.
Would you like to see a sketch of the place, transposed, it's true, but very exact, drawn by the author in La Peau de Chagrin, that work which contains so much of himself?
"… A room which looks down upon the yards of the neighboring houses, from the windows of which extend long poles hung with washing; nothing was more horrible than that garret with those yellow, grimy walls, which soaked in the misery and called out to its scholar. The roof slanted in a uniform fashion, and the loosened tiles permitted a view of the sky; there was room for a bed, a table, a few chairs, and under the sharp angle of the roof I could position my piano … I lived in this aerial sepulcher for almost three years, working night and day, without rest, with so much pleasure that my studies seemed to be the most beautiful focus, the happiest solution to human life. The calm and silence necessary to the scholar have some elements of the sweetness and intoxication of love … Study lends a sort of magic to everything that surrounds us. The meager desk upon which I wrote and the brown leather that covered it, my piano, my bed, my armchair, the peculiar wallpaper, my furniture, all of these things came to life and became for me humble friends, silent partners in my future. How many times have I not shared my soul while gazing upon them? Often, while letting my eyes wander on a crooked molding, I would encounter new developments, a striking proof of my system that I believed was able to convey nearly untranslatable thoughts."
In this same passage, he makes an allusion to his work: "I had undertaken two great works; a comedy that was in only a few days to give me fame, a fortune and entry into that world in which I wanted to reappear while exercising the kingly rights of a man of genius. You have all seen in this masterpiece the first error of a young man just out of college, the nonsense of a child. Your jibes destroyed the nascent illusions, which since then have not been awakened …"
One recognizes here the ill-fated Cromwell, which, read in front of the family and the assembled friends, was a complete fiasco.
Honoré appealed this sentence before an arbiter whom he accepted as competent, an honorable old man, a former professor at the École Polytechnique. The judgment was that the author should do "anything at all, except literature."
What a loss for letters, what a void in the human spirit if the young man had bowed before the experience of the old man and listened to his counsel, which, certainly, was most wise, because there was not the least spark of genius nor even of talent in this rhetorical tragedy! Happily Balzac, under the pseudonym of Louis Lambert, had not composed for nothing at the college of Vendôme the Traité de la Volonté.
He submitted to the sentence, but only for tragedy; he understood that he should give up trying to walk in the footsteps of Corneille and Racine, whom he so admired without being in their debt, for never were geniuses more contrary to that of himself. The novel offered him a more suitable model, and he wrote at this time a great number of volumes which he did not sign and which he always disavowed. The Balzac that we know and that we admire was still in limbo and struggled in vain to extricate himself. Those who had judged him capable of being nothing but a copyist appeared to be right; perhaps even this option had failed him, because his beautiful handwriting had already deteriorated with the crumpled, crossed out, overwritten, near hieroglyphic drafts of the writer fighting for the idea and no longer concerned about the beauty of the character.
Thus, nothing resulted from this rigorous confinement, this hermetic life in the Thébaïde in which Raphaël outlines the budget: "Three sous of bread, two sous of milk, three sous of meat that prevented me from dying of hunger and kept my mind in a state of singular lucidity. My lodgings cost me three sous a day; I burned three sous of oil every night, I took care of my own room, I wore flannel shirts so that I would spend only two sous a day for laundry. I warmed myself with coal, whose price divided by the days in the year never gave more than two sous for each. I had suits of clothes, linens, and shoes for three years: I didn't want to get dressed except to go to certain public lectures and to the libraries; these expenses combined were only eighteen sous: there remained two sous for unforeseen things. I do not recall having, during this long period of work, having passed the Pont des Arts or ever buying water."
Without doubt, Raphaël exaggerated these economies a little, but Balzac's correspondence with his sister shows that the novel does not differ much from the reality. The old woman referred to in his letters by the name of Iris la Messagère, who was 70 years-old, could not have been a very active housekeeper, as Balzac writes: "The news of my household is disastrous, the work does harm to its cleanliness. This rascal of Myself neglects himself more and more, he only descends every three or four days to make some purchases, he goes to the closest and worst provisioned merchants in the quarter: the others are too far, and the fellow economizes even his steps; so that your brother (destined for so much celebrity) is already nourished absolutely like a great man, that is to say that he is dying of hunger."
"Another problem: The coffee is made terribly bitter by dirt. Lots of water is needed to correct the damage; but the water does not rise to my celestial garret (it descends there only on stormy days), it will require, after the purchase of the piano, the installation of a hydraulic machine, if the coffee continues to disappear while the master and the servant daydream."
Elsewhere, continuing the joking, he reprimands the lazy Myself, the only footman that he has in his service, who does not fill the basin, leaves dust balls scattered freely under the bed, the dirt obscuring the windows, and the spiders spinning their webs in the corners.
In another letter, he writes: "I have eaten two melons … it will be necessary to pay for them with nuts and dry bread!"
One of the rare recreations that he permitted himself was to go to the Jardin des Plantes or Père-Lachaise. At the summit of the funereal hill, he towered over Paris like Rastignac at the burial of Père Goriot. His gaze glided over this ocean of slate and tile that cover up so much luxury, misery, intrigue and passion. Like a young eagle, he took in his prey at a glance; but he still had no wings, no beak, no talons, although his eye could already fix itself on the sun. He said, contemplating the tombs: "There are no more beautiful epitaphs than these: La Fontaine, Masséna, Molière: one single name that says everything and makes us dream!"
This sentence contains an ill-defined but prophetic understanding that the future realized, alas!, too soon. On the slope of the hill, upon a sepulchral stone, beneath a bust cast in bronze, after the marble of David, the word BALZAC says everything and makes the solitary wanderer dream.
The dietary regimen recommended by Raphaël could be favorable to the lucidity of the brain; but certainly it was worthless for a young man used to the comfort of family life. The fifteen months that passed under these intellectual burdens, sadder, without fail, than those of Venice, had made the youthful Tourangeau with the soft, glowing cheeks a Parisian skeleton, haggard and yellow, nearly unrecognizable. Balzac reentered the paternal home, where the fatted calf was killed for the return of this only slightly prodigal child.
I glide lightly over the period of his life when he tried to ensure independence by speculations in the book trade and during which only a lack of capital prevented him from finding success. These ventures put him in debt, mortgaged his future, and despite the devoted assistance offered perhaps too late by the family, burdened him with the rock of Sisyphus that he so many times pushed just to the edge of the hill, and which always fell back with more crushing weight upon the shoulders of this Atlas, overloaded besides by an entire world.
This debt that he made it a sacred duty to discharge, because it represented the fortune of those who were dear to him, was Necessity armed with a spiked whip, her hand bearing bronze nails that harassed him night and day, with neither truce nor pity, making him regard every hour of repose or recreation as a theft. She dominated his entire life painfully, often rendering it inexplicable to he who did not possess its secret.
Having provided these indispensable biographical details, I come to my direct and personal impressions of Balzac.
Balzac, that immense brain, that physiologist so penetrating, that observer so profound, that mind so intuitive, did not possess the literary gift: within him there opened an abyss between the thought and the form. That abyss, particularly in the early years, he despaired of crossing. He threw himself without fulfillment into volume upon volume, observation upon observation, essay upon essay; an entire library of disavowed books passed through there. A will less robust would have been discouraged a thousand times; but happily Balzac had an unshakeable confidence in his genius, unknown to all the world. He wanted to be a great man, and he was that by his unrelenting projections of that force that was more powerful than electricity, and with which he made such subtle analyses in Louis Lambert.